For those skilled in the art of the present invention, it is of common knowledge that there exists a multitude of different operating systems from different vendors, yet the process of launching and managing an application on traditional computer systems having a screen, a mouse family type input device and a graphical UI is, in terms of process, identical. For example: a) the user selects the application to launch using a program manager that lists all available applications, for example, in tree view style or using a home screen or a desktop on which the various applications are represented with small pictures also known as icons. b) The user decides whether to display the started application on the entire viewable area (maximized or full screen) or only in a dedicated smaller area of the entire viewable screen area. In this case the user can also move the application's window (the viewable user interface portion of the application) on the screen to any desired position. c) If several applications have been launched the user can switch between the applications using a task manager if all applications have been maximized or he can simply use the mouse family type input device to point to a window of the desired application if these applications reside next to each other on the entire viewable screen.
It is important to notice that this method is appropriate for a computer system which is equipped with a human input device (HID) such as mouse, mouse stick, touch pad or track ball which allows to execute a complex suite of actions with high precision—requiring fine motor skills—on very small areas of the viewable screen. With the HID, the user moves a viewable pointer on the screen (mouse pointer) and this movement occurs with high precision thanks to fine motor skills of the user and the fact that the HID device translates larger movements of the HID to smaller movements of the pointer, thus achieving even greater precision. Furthermore HIDs do not only provide precise movement translation, but also further input controls such as additional buttons or wheels to operate important UI functions independent or in conjunction with the movement detection.
For a better understanding of the legacy process, FIG. 1 shows the different steps as they are used on traditional computer systems having a screen, a graphical UI and a mouse family type of input device.
For those skilled in the art it is common knowledge that it has become an important global industry trend that classical computer systems having a screen and using a HID such as mouse, touch pad or track ball are growingly replaced by devices using a touch panel and the human finger(s) as the primary input device. Those devices—typically referred to as tablet PCs (‘tablets’) and SmartPhones—are generally characterized by the fact that the viewable screen is technically combined with a second layer—a touch panel—to control operations on the device with the human finger(s). Viewable and touchable area is generally the same. The touch panel replaces both the classical external keyboard by displaying a virtual keyboard on the screen and the classical mouse family type of input device by interpreting the user's finger touches on the touchable screen as events for controlling operations of the operating system or applications.
The fact that touch panel devices combine the functions of several traditional external input and output devices (for example: screen, mouse, keyboard) leads to reduced costs and also to higher reliability of this new device type because moving parts as required for keyboard and mouse are no longer used. This however translates to reduced manufacturing and total ownership costs throughout the life cycle of the touch panel device. This amongst other advantages—plus the fact that touch panel devices are often perceived less as a computer but more as a consumer device—explains the strongly growing popularity of this device type, which is important to notice for the relevance of this invention.
It is important to notice that the effectively interpretable input resolution of the touch panel is naturally much lower than the input resolution of a classical computer system having a HID such as mouse, touch pad or trackball because the surface of the human fingerprint is many multiples larger than the exactly positioned point or area of a graphical pointer as used by HIDs. Also—as there is no HID—there is no translation of 3 bigger HID movements to smaller movements of a (non-existing) graphical pointer. Instead finger touches of the user are translated 1:1 to X/Y coordinates on the touch panel. Furthermore HIDs provide further input possibilities as described above that can simply not be copied or emulated with the human finger for obvious reasons. As a consequence, using the finger as input device is much more imprecise and cannot provide the same feature set as using a dedicated HID.
Due to the limitations of the human fingers as an input device, the classical launch and window management of applications on computer system having a HID such as mouse, mouse stick, touch pad or track ball cannot be applied to computer systems having a touch panel as the primary input device. It is simply not practical, it is considered extremely difficult or impossible to imitate complex HID operations that require fine motor skills with something as big and imprecise as the human finger. The usage problem exists not only on small devices with small view area and touch panel such as SmartPhones but also on mid-sized devices such as tablet PCs that provide a viewable and touchable screen area of 10″ and more nowadays.
As a consequence of the limitations of the human finger as an input device and because of other system limitation, the majority of operating systems for such SmartPhones or tablets were conceived to simplify the application launch and management by providing a very basic method. To better understand the differences to the traditional approach to manage user input FIG. 2 shows the traditional process.
The disadvantages of the method described in FIG. 2 are obvious: a) only one application can be monitored and worked with at a time. Applications that have been launched before the last selected application may run in the background but the user has no visual feedback of the state of such an application. Maybe the application has finished a process and important results for the user exist, maybe the application was terminated by the operating system for some reason—the user will not know it. b) in order to launch a different application the currently running application must be closed or reduced in viewable size. Often this means that the user must switch to the desktop and select and launch a new application from there, c) the exchange of information (for example copy and paste of text) between different application is greatly complicated because the application providing the source information must be closed or set to background, then the application receiving the information must be launched or put to foreground. A simple transfer from one UI window to the other is not possible.
In essence: 1. It is an industry trend that traditional computer systems of the type having a screen, a graphical UI and a HID (human input device) such as mouse, mouse stick, trackball or touch pad are increasingly being replaced by computer systems having a screen, a graphical UI and a touch panel that is integrated into the screen display and that is operated with human finger as primary input device. These devices are generally referred to as SmartPhones or tablet PCs. 2. The traditional method of application launch and window management for computer systems with graphical UI and having a HID such as mouse, mouse stick, track ball or 4 touch pad as an input device cannot be applied to the new generation of touch panel devices such as SmartPhones and tablets due to the natural limitations of the human finger as input device: the method is difficult to use, inefficient and de-facto not practicable. Those skilled in the art know that operating systems trying to implement this method nevertheless (using the finger or a finger replacement such as a stylus) have failed to impose itself in the market. 3. The current, commonly implemented and used method to launch and manage applications on the new generation of touch panel devices as shown in FIG. 2 is significantly limited, in particular because different applications can not truly be run in parallel, cannot be monitored by the user next to each other at the same time, because exchange of information is cumbersome. At the time of writing this patent document about 90% of all SmartPhones and tablet PCs use the method as described in FIG. 2 according to data provided by well-established market research companies.